Berlisha Morton

Berlisha R. Morton, PhD, is a Southern Afrofuturista. She created Southern Womaxnism, a theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological framework to center the subjectivity Southern Black women and Queer folx in Southern historiography. Her scholarship and art are driven by a desire to acknowledge women like her grandmother and great-aunt – domestic workers whose formal educational opportunities were constrained by the Jim Crow South but whose intellectual and spiritual footprints are very much present in literary and educational canons.

She received her doctorate from Louisiana State University and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Southern University and A&M College, an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Her scholarship has appeared in the Encyclopedia of African American Education, The Western Journal of Black Studies, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, the Gender and Education journal, the Journal of Curriculum Studies Research, and in edited volumes on African American students’ college readiness and Black women’s educational philosophy.

Dr. Morton founded Mamas’ Gardens which is a firm that provides creative counseling, writing workshops, and narrative construction to individuals and institutions. Mamas' Gardens has produced workshops and lectures for Queen’s Company, a networking firm for women of color in Boston Massachusetts, The Only Space, an international black womxn’s blog, the Black Studies department at Cal State -Fullerton, Staffbase, an international communications firm, and the Division of Student Affairs at Tulane University. Mamas’ Gardens is also the home of Dr. Morton’s one act play, Utterances: An Afrofuturistic Ghost Story. Utterances premiered at Colgate University on April 1, 2017, with the assistance of dedicated, brilliant, and beloved Colgate students. At Colgate University, Dr. Morton received the ALANA Center Award for Faculty Service from the students and staff at the ALANA Multicultural Center.